The Iowa Supreme Court rules that contracts made with surrogate mothers are legal in the state.

The case involves a couple from Cedar Rapids who were nearing 50 years old when they married in 2013 and decided they wanted to have a child. They placed an online ad in 2015 and signed an agreement to have the Muscatine woman serve as the surrogate mother. Both embryos implanted in the surrogate mother took hold — but the twins were born prematurely and one died.

The surrogate mother then refused to give up the surviving baby, saying the surrogate contract was not legal in Iowa. The district court, after genetic testing, ruled the contract is enforceable, terminated the parental rights of the surrogate mother and her husband, and awarded the Cedar Rapids man permanent legal and physical custody.

On appeal, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the district court ruling, saying there is no legal prohibition of such contracts in the state. It says the legislature exempted them from criminal liability for selling children in 1989 following extensive national publicity given the “Baby M” case in New Jersey.

The ruling terminates the rights of the surrogate mother and gives custody of the child to the Cedar Rapids father.

Child adoption events were held in several Iowa cities this past weekend, with two of the largest events in Black Hawk and Hamilton counties.

As part of the Adoption Saturday event in Webster City, a family from Rockwell City family adopted a boy just in time for Thanksgiving.

Rachel Black said she and her husband, Brian, were thrilled to add to their family via adoption. “He’s our third in three years. His name is Alex and we’re super, super excited,” Black says. “It’s been 311 days. Yes, we’ve counted, and we’re so excited to welcome him to our home.” Black says they’re no strangers to adoption.

“His biological brother we adopted last year in Fort Dodge and then we adopted another one in Fort Dodge the year before that, too,” she says, laughing. In all on Saturday, 16 children were adopted by ten families in Webster City while 23 children were adopted in Waterloo. Learn more about the adoption process in Iowa at this website — www.iowafosterandadoption.org.

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst is cosponsoring legislation with fellow Republican Senator Marco Rubio or Florida, which she says will help states make better use of federal programs for those trying to get out of poverty.

Ernst, who is from Red Oak, says her travels around the state raised several questions about poverty issues. “How can we help Iowans overcome financial hardships and obstacles? Is the federal government hurting or helping? How can we as a nation do better?,” Ernst says. She says she came to the conclusion that something needs to be done to improve the system.

“The reality is — despite over 80 programs and billion of taxpayer dollars spent annually — the federal governor often fails to address the barriers to self-sufficiency to those living in poverty,” according to Ernst. Ernst says she learned when she was still a state senator that the federal programs designed to help those in poverty can often end up being part of the problem. She cited a woman she met in Lenox who was getting assistance and had to make a tough decision about getting a promotion at her job at a care center.

“This young women went home and calculated what her pay increase would be along with all the government assistance she would lose. What she figured out, is that taking the promotion would actually cost her 200 dollars a month,” Ernst says. Ernst says the woman decided to go ahead and take the promotion and deal with the lost of funds to support her family. Ernst says her legislation gives state the flexibility to review and revise the programs to ensure those trying to improve themselves don’t fall off a cliff when their federal support levels go down.

“The Empowers Act would allow states to apply for four-year temporary waivers to integrate and reform two or more federal programs that assist folks in need,” Ernst explains. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds joined Ernst for the announcement of the legislation. Reynolds says too often the federal money comes with a one-size-fits-all approach that makes it tough to mesh with state programs.

“It’s nearly impossible for the two efforts to align despite having the same goal — and that goal is to empower Iowans and reduce poverty,” Reynolds says.

Reynolds says the system ends up with state organizations working in their own “silos.” If the bill becomes law — she would ask all her department heads to find opportunities to use it to help Iowans.

“Have them look at the opportunities that we have in front of us and see if collectively the can figure out a way to really break down those silos and take the flexibility that we have and to coordinate that in a better manner,” Reynolds says. “To really work smarter, to find ways to work smarter and serve more Iowans.”

Ernst says the states that get waivers would get the same amount of money that other states get for the same programs and would be required to put any savings back into programs to help people in poverty.

Governor Kim Reynolds is hiring a lawyer with a long career as a child advocate to lead a state agency under scrutiny for how its child welfare programs are managed.

Sixty-four-year-old Jerry Foxhoven will take over as director of the Iowa Department of Human Services on Thursday. Foxhoven worked primarily in juvenile and family court until 2000, when he took a job in the department. He was administrator of the Iowa Child Advocacy Board.

He also managed the Iowa Citizen Foster Care Review Board as well as the program that appoints advocates for children involved in court cases because they were abused or neglected by a parent or guardian.

Since 2006, though, Foxhoven has been working outside the DHS, leading the national Center for Children’s rights. He’s also been a Drake University’s law school professor for the past decade. In 2014, Foxhoven led a coalition that released a voter guide showing how former Governor Terry Branstad and his Democratic challenger would address issues like child care, foster care and preschool.

“There are major child policy issues which much be addressed for childrens’ and Iowa’s properity into the future,” Foxhoven said in 2014.

Governor Reynolds calls Foxhoven a “compassionate, thoughtful leader.” Foxhoven promises to build “trust and relationships in all 99 counties…to solve the challenges many Iowa families are facing each day.”

Child welfare experts at the Iowa Department of Human Services are seeking changes in state law to better protect children whose caregivers are involved with illegal drugs.

Under a proposed bill, a wider variety of controlled substances would trigger a child abuse investigation. Jenae Harvey, with the DHS Child Welfare Bureau, says several key drugs found in homes aren’t now covered.

Harvey says, “What we’ve seen over the past two years is families where cocaine, heroin, opioids and methamphetamines are alleged, those caregivers tend to be involved with the Department of Human Services repetitively.”

The current law was designed to protect children in homes where methamphetamines were being used, sold or manufactured. Under the proposed bill, a child abuse investigation would be warranted if the drug activity occurs even when the child is not home. Harvey says the DHS has had repeated contacts with families where cocaine, heroin, opioids and meth are present.

She says, “We want to have the opportunity to do the necessary safety and risk assessments for the children and get the caregivers the substance abuse treatment they need in order to be the best parents that they can.”

Under the proposed change, the DHS would spend more time evaluating the families. A similar bill failed to win passage last year.

A report from the Iowa Policy Project (IPP) suggests the state make some changes to help families who face more expenses as they make more money and become ineligible for government support programs.

IPP research director Peter Fisher says they looked at several of the programs. “Most support programs are designed to gradually reduce benefits as the family earns more. And by tapering the benefits off in that fashion, it pretty much always pays to get a better job, to work more hours to raise your income,” Fisher says.

But Fisher says they’ve found that most families need to earn two to three times the poverty level to meet their budget. But in some cases families can drop off a cliff when the increased income doesn’t match the loss of government support.

“What we find in these programs is that the majority end benefits well below twice the poverty level. So in other words, well before a family is to the point where they can be self sufficient — most of these programs disappear,” Fisher says. He says child care support is one key example they focused on in this report.

“Families start to pay a little bit toward child care once their income exceeds 100 percent of poverty. But then when they hit 145 percent of poverty they loose all childcare assistance,” Fisher says. “And that can be a 5, 10, 12,000-a-year cost.” Fisher says only ten states have a lower poverty threshold for child support and raising that a little may be part of the solution to preventing the cliff drop off.

“What if you went up to 200 percent of poverty — which a lot of states are at — and then increase, in effect about doubling that copay by the time you get to that 200 percent of poverty.The copay is much larger than it is under the current formula,” Fisher says. “When you do that, you can phase co-pays out and you can eliminate the cliff effect.”

Other recommendations include expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit to provide even stronger support to low-wage workers, encourage more work effort, and keep children out of poverty. And expanding the Child and Dependent Care Credit to cushion the loss of Child Care Assistance.

This report is the third a series called “Cost of Living in Iowa, ” which you can find out more on the IPP website.

There’s an urgent call for Iowa families to open their homes to take in foster children and to adopt. Bambi Schrader, recruitment supervisor for Iowa KidsNet, says there’s a critical need for families to shelter sibling groups, teenagers and children who are older than eight-years-old.

“We have about 4,000 children in the foster care system,” Schrader says. “In 2015, there were 2,560 children referred into foster care. Unfortunately, we only have about 2,100 foster homes across our state right now so we’re in desperate need.” There’s a continual waiting list for children in Iowa seeking “forever homes.”

“A lot of times children are waiting longer in shelters or residential treatments or unsafe situations or there are being multiple children placed into a home where they might’ve only taken one or two children, now they have three or four,” Schrader says. “We want to make sure each child has their own unique home that meets their needs.” For many children in foster care, it could take three years to be adopted. She says there’s a need for every type of family as kids come in all types.

“We need everything from two-parent households to single-parent households, same-sex couples,” Schrader says. “We need some older couples that maybe aren’t looking to adopt but would take an infant that we want to reunify.”

Private adoptions may take several years and tens of thousands of dollars, but she says state adoptions through Iowa KidsNet are essentially free. The adoption process may take six months and it includes a home study, 30-hours of classwork and a background check.

“Having lots of money or having a nice, fancy home is not what the kids need,” Schrader says. “They need people who care about them. They need people who love them. They need people to be there after school and people who will say, ‘No, you’re wearing that to school. Go change your clothes,’ or put discipline into their lives. A lot of our kids don’t have that or when they do have it, it was done in a harmful way.”

More than 23,000 children age out of the foster care system nationwide every year. Last year in Iowa, 39 children aged out with no family or permanent home. Learn more at http://www.IowaKidsNet.comor by calling 800-243-0756.

The new “Kids Count” report on the wellbeing of children ranks Iowa third in the nation overall, up one slot from fourth place last year.

Laura Speer, spokeswoman for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, says Iowa is in the top tiers of a majority of the key areas of the study, with 16 categories including education, economics, health and safety.

“The state has among the lowest child poverty rates in the country at 15 percent,” Speer says. “Still, that means 100,000 kids in the state are living below the federal poverty line, which is about $25,000 a year for a family of four, not much money at all.”

The study found Iowa is seeing an increase in the number of 8th graders who are proficient in math and a drop in the percentage of children who are living in households with a high housing cost burden.

“About 3 percent of children in Iowa lacked health insurance coverage in 2014,” Speer says. “That’s among the lowest rates in the country and a significant decline since 2008 which was about the height of the recession.”

The study shows more Iowa teens are staying in school and staying away from alcohol. They’re also not getting pregnant as often as in previous years. “In Iowa, the rate of teen births is very low at 20 births per 1,000 teens, that’s a big improvement since 2008,” Speer says. “There’s also been an increase in the percent of high school students who are graduating on time and a decline in the percent of teens who abuse alcohol and drugs.”

Iowa ranks toward the very top in most of the criteria, but Speer says there’s still room for improvement in a few important areas. “Even though Iowa does pretty well in terms of the education measures that we track, still, 62 percent of 4th graders in Iowa are not proficient in reading,” Speer says. “That’s almost two out of three 4th graders not proficient in reading, which is too many.”

The study found Iowa’s figures for child poverty and single-parent families have worsened in the past few years, while more Iowa children have parents who lack secure employment. See the full report at the Annie E. Casey Foundation website: www.aecf.org

A relationship study of older mothers found more issues than expected with their children. Iowa State University researcher Megan Gilligan is the lead author the study which she says found 1 in 10 mothers had at least one estranged child. They didn’t start the study with a focus on finding mom and kids who weren’t talking.

“So there were no questions directly asked, you know ‘is there a child who you are estranged from?’ But, we did ask all of the mothers about their relationships with each of their children,” Gilligan explains. “So the study was designed to look at how these relationships might vary. Some mothers may be closer to one child, or the opposite where they may be more disappointed in another child.”

The study included mothers aged 65 to 75 with children who were 45 or older. “The first thing we looked was if a mother had not contact — either in person or on the phone — in the last year. And then also, we classified estrangement if the mother maybe had very small amount of contact, so maybe she had talked to them once in the last year,” Gilligan says.

They also asked the mothers about their emotional closeness and she says they were surprised at the number who say they have little emotional closeness to a child.

“Which is actually pretty rare in parent-adult child relationships. Most of the time mothers report either middle-range or actually high range emotional closeness. So, there were relationships that the mother reported very little emotional closeness to these children,” Gilligan says.

Gilligan is an assistant professor of human development and family studies at ISU and conducted the research with colleagues at Purdue and Cornell University. She says they were surprised again when they started looking at the cause of the bad feelings between mother child. “Immediately everyone kind of thought on the research team, well lets look at illegal behavior — so we looked at if the child had had problems with the law or if they had a substance abuse problem, ” Gilligan says. “But was really interesting is that didn’t predict estrangement. Those children weren’t more likely to become estranged.”

They found something else impacted the rift. She says “value dissimilarities” ended up being the strongest variable. The core values and beliefs of the mothers drove their views of their kids. “One of the mothers was really upset that her adult child had gotten a divorce and then remarried. She was Catholic and she said ‘that really goes against what I believe religiously and morally.’ So thing that were kind of core to their beliefs and values, if the child had violated those things, that’s what created this tension and strain in the relationship,” Gilligan explains.

Gilligan says they didn’t expect those issues to cause so the estrangement. “I think it’s interesting, because I think these are issues we often think about as political issues that you might get into a discussion around the table and get really upset about those types of things. But, I don’t know if most people would feel like these are things you would cut off contact from your child,” Gilligan.

In addition to core values, researchers found the mother’s marital status was also a predictor. Mothers who were divorced or widowed were more likely to have an estranged child than mothers who were married. Gilligan credits the role of the father. She says many of the incidents the created estrangement happened earlier in the child’s life and they might not have realized the impact it would have. Gilligan says the lesson could be that you need to focus on mending a relationship right away when these things happen. The new study is published online in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

A new report shows Iowa has children living in institutions and group care situations, not families, at a much higher rate than the national average. The report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds nearly 20-percent of children in the foster care system in Iowa were placed outside of families, well above the national average of 14-percent.

Tracey Feild, director of the foundation’s child welfare strategy group, says over-reliance on group placement is becoming the norm. “We are certain that they could do better,” Feild says. “The best states have 5% of kids in group facilities or institutions, so there’s a long way to go to get to the highest performance and get to the best environment for kids’ living situations who must be removed from their families.”

Research in the “Every Kid Needs a Family” report shows youth in group placements were more than twice as likely to be arrested compared with similar youth in foster families. Feild says children, especially teenagers, need a strong moral compass to help develop into productive adults, something they can get in a family setting. “When kids grow up and age out of institutions, they don’t do as well,” Feild says. “They don’t have the same educational attainment, they don’t have the same employment abilities and they aren’t able as well to develop families of their own.”

In addition to the toll on a child’s cognitive and social development, the report finds group placements cost the state seven to ten times what it costs to place a child in family or foster care. The organization offers several suggestions, Feild says, to start turning the numbers around. “Let’s try and provide services in the home, in their birth families, to give the families and to give the kids help in dealing with the conflicts that often emerge in their teenage years,” Feild says. “Second, is to better support our foster parents and our kinship caregivers.”

A third area would be to require more and better justification when a child comes into the foster care system before the child is put in an institution. She says that should be a temporary solution, at the most, not long-term. See the full “Every Kid Needs a Family” report at the Annie E. Casey Foundation website: www.aecf.org